Big Data for development

As a global coalition on Big Data and development, Data-Pop Alliance works together with different actors to promote a people-centered revolution on these technologies. We took advantage of the visit of its program manager, Natalie Shoup, to Barcelona to talk about the challenges and risks of Big Data and Analytics, especially regarding education and development. According to Shoup, we need to engage people both in data literacy and in the ethical and legal discussions around those technologies. Check out her reflections in the short video below.

« A lot of challenges we face come in education, come in people understanding the potential and the power of this technologies»

Every day we generate a huge amount of big data, but we need to resort to analytics to make abstract information meaningful and get valuable knowledge from it. In education, learning platforms let us easily gather an immense quantity of data regarding students’ behaviour, interactions, preferences and opinions. When properly analysed — through learning analytics — all these data might provide useful insight on how to make learning processes more adaptive, attractive and efficient.

Are these techniques allowing us to provide better support to our students? Are we taking advantage of big data and analytics to help shape the citizens of the future?